Tatiana Schlossberg, Kennedy daughter who wrote of her cancer, dies at 35

Summary

• Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK's granddaughter and climate journalist, died on December 30 at age 35, after battling a rare form of leukaemia.
• In a November essay, Schlossberg revealed her diagnosis and criticised her cousin, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for vaccine scepticism and cutting cancer research funds.
• The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum announced her death, stating: "Our beautiful Tatiana passed away this morning. She will always be in our hearts".

WASHINGTON - Ms Tatiana Schlossberg, an environmental journalist and a daughter of Ms Caroline Kennedy – and granddaughter of President John F. Kennedy – whose harrowing essay about her rare and aggressive blood cancer, published in The New Yorker magazine in November, drew worldwide sympathy and praise for Ms Schlossberg’s courage and raw honesty, died on Dec 30. She was 35.

Her death was announced in an Instagram post by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, signed by her family. It did not say where she died.

Titled A Battle With My Blood, the essay appeared online on Nov 22, the 62nd anniversary of her grandfather’s assassination. It appeared in print in the Dec 8 issue of the magazine with a different headline, A Further Shore. In it, Ms Schlossberg wrote of how she learned of her cancer after the birth of her daughter in May 2024.

It was leukemia, with a rare mutation. Ms Schlossberg had a new baby, and a 2-year-old son.

She wrote of months of chemotherapy and a postpartum hemorrhage, from which she almost bled to death, followed by more chemo and then a stem cell transplant – a Hail Mary pass that might cure her. Her older sister, Ms Rose Schlossberg, was a match and would donate her cells.

“For my whole life, I have tried to be good,” she wrote, “to be a good student and a good sister and a good daughter, and to protect my mother and never make her upset or angry. Now I have added a new tragedy to her life, to our family’s life, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

Having grown up in the glare of her parents’ glamour, and her family’s tragedies, Ms Caroline Kennedy largely succeeded in giving her own children a life out of the spotlight – a relatively normal, if privileged, upbringing, along with a call to public service that was the Kennedy legacy.

Ms Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg was born on May 5, 1990, in Manhattan, the middle child of Ms Caroline Kennedy and Mr Edwin Schlossberg, an interactive digital designer. She attended the Brearley School and then Trinity School, private schools in Manhattan. She studied history at Yale University, graduating in 2012, and earned a master’s degree in history from Oxford University in 2014.

In between, Ms Schlossberg, who had been the editor of The Yale Herald, was a reporter at The Record of northern New Jersey. In 2012, she was named Rookie of the Year by the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists. She joined The New York Times in 2014, working first on the metropolitan desk and then as a science and climate reporter.

Ms Schlossberg was the author of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have (2019), a kind of consumer’s guide to the ways in which human behavior adversely affects the climate. In 2020, the Society of Environmental Journalists honored the book with the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.

Ms Schlossberg is survived by her parents, her siblings and her husband, whom she met at Yale and married in 2017, along with their two young children. NYTIMES